Have a Ball! And Some Stew.

So, enjoying this cold weather? I sure am. One of the things I love about living in Pennsylvania (and I guess the northeast in general) is that the seasons are very distinct. I love all of the seasons and the weather they bring, and a warm winter just doesn't feel right to me. Bring on the snow and the bright, bracing cold! It feels so invigorating to be out on a cold day and come home to a warm house and a spicy stew in the crockpot.

Anyway, now that I've gotten that out of my system, this is a birthday card I did for my nine-year old nephew, who is a big football fan. Frankly, I can't stand sports of any kind, especially football, so this one was kind of a challenge for me. I drew a football on chipboard and covered it with textured paper. I also punched holes in it and threaded it to look like it was sewn. The "Have a" letters are rub-ons, and the "BALL" and the stars are stickers from a Harley-Davidson collection.

Onil's Birthday 2007

My husband turned 30 yesterday so I made him this card. It's nothing more than computer-generated -- no stickers, no brads, no ribbons. Just a picture with some words over it. I had to do this all at work so he didn't see me making it, and I don't have all my usual stuff here.

I did a GIS for Darth Vader and found a sweet desktop picture. I added some black bars to the side and top to fill in the background without stretching out Darth Vader's face and added the fonts. The top font is Arial Narrow word art, but the bottom font is one I downloaded from 1001 Free Fonts called Star Jedi. This particular font is annoying because the font creator's logo shows up as a character when you hit the return key. I got around it by hitting the shift+enter so the return character didn't show up.

On the inside of the card, I found a picture of a Star Wars cake (after doing a GIS for "Star Wars birthday"), printed that, cut it out and pasted it on the inside. When I get home tonight the kids and I will sign his card and do the present and the birthday pie (this year, key lime!).

Back From Vacation!

I was out for a couple of weeks over the holidays and just got back into work today. Because our scanners and computers are so much better here, I wait to update until I get into work. Anyway, while I was out I had the time to make some cards. This first card was made by printing a picture from the internet onto white linen cardstock. The snowflakes are stickers. I'm a little unhappy with the bottom bar on the side -- it's kind of crooked. I'd like to change it but I used permanent tape and by the time I noticed it the tape had set. If I take it off now I'll tear the card. Also, I'm not quite sure about the rick rack; I think a white organza ribbon would have been better.



A few years ago I realized that you could use CD envelopes to mail cards, and the cool thing about them is that the card will show through the envelope (the address and stamp go on the sealed side). The next two images are a card and the same card in a CD envelope.





I was inspired by the CD envelope and made six cards total in that shape (two are Valentine cards which I'll feature in another post later). Here are the rest of the cards; the next card also shows what it looks like when it's opened.